My grandmother got her law degree from Syracuse University in roughly 1911 and later co-founded with her husband an investment banking firm on Wall Street known as Lebenthal & Co.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My mom was the first African-American woman to graduate from the University of Chicago Law School, in 1946. She had leadership roles in the law, in government and the corporate world. She was a great role model in that she felt anything was possible.
I worked at a law firm in New York very briefly.
My father was on the faculty in the Chemistry Department of Harvard University; my mother had one year of graduate work in physics before her marriage.
My dad for a long time was an accounting professor at Rice University. And then he went out on his own, and he got hired by a client. He ended up being CEO of a hospital management company before he retired, called Lifemark.
I was the first person to go to university from my family.
I went to see the stock exchange when I was 18 years old. I'm not a Wall Street lawyer, I'm a Stanwix Street lawyer. Stanwix Street is a street in downtown Pittsburgh. One of the clients is Mellon Bank, which merged with the Bank of New York Mellon a number of years ago. And I have for years have done software licensing for Mellon.
When I came back to India after Harvard Business School, I started as a lawyer and as a trade union leader.
I was shocked, and I ended up contacting three academics to find out if it could possibly be that my grandmother was a courtesan.
I was raised by my grandparents, who had a little general store. My grandmother, Marion Dunham Bowman, was a graduate of Albany Law School. Although she never did practice law, she kept the house filled with books. It's because of her that I was always reading.
At my father's request I took up the study of law at the University of Zurich In 1863.